Re: Is smartwatch support something BBOS10 users want?

The answer is, not until the battery life gets fixed.
My watch is fully mechanical. It does its job, i.e. date, day of week,time. It is accurate to less than 1 minute in 2 weeks and, because it is automatic, it never needs winding or battery replacement. And it will probably last over 20 years. Until a "smart watch" does the job of telling time as well as a normal watch, and has a reasonable battery life - at least a month - or is solar/motion powered, it's a toy.

Re: Is smartwatch support something BBOS10 users want?

Surely it's something for the smartwatch developers to want. What I mean is, if they want the largest possible number of potential customers, they should make it available for all platforms.

Their potential market is, in my opinion, fairly limited within the smartphone market, so making their watches available to the largest number of potential customers by making them multi-platform only seems logical.

If I'm not going to where a regular watch (which I often don't anymore), it is because I'm using the phone as a watch. Blackberry 10 has plenty of API's that the smartwatch community could use, so I don't think BlackBerry needs to embrace the smartwatch, the opposite needs to happen. In fact maybe some of the watch makers need to license QNX, then they could use QNET to make the two talk.

Appears the real issue is the Meta Watches makers ignorance of BB10 and when they stated that they tried to work with BBOS before and had issues. This is a very niche market from the looks of it.

it would appear that the real issue everyone has with BB10 is that no one knows about BB10, or cares very much, given its low profile compared to Android/IOS. talking of niche markets seems very relevant in this context.

to be fair to metawatch their product was first announced in march 2011 (by HP when they they were promoting WebOS!) and the developer products went on sale just over a year ago when BB was selling BB7 phones....................................

and a year later they are still selling BB7 phones with no change in sight until the BB10 platform gets announced at the end of january 2013, with products to launch "soon after".

in total, nearly two years later, so i am willing to cut metawatch (and anyone else) some slack when it comes to knowing (and caring) squat about BB10.

yes, smartwatches are currently niche, but they are also a huge marketing score pointing to the forward looking ambition of a mobile platform.

BB internal dev's may well have their hands full at the moment, but you'd hope an external dev would see an opportunity from which (potential) users would benefit.

Re: Is smartwatch support something BBOS10 users want?

I still have my mechanical watch.
I currently don't really see the point in a smart watch.
Whats's the point of using a watch when you have a cell phone in you pocket?
But it could be good for inividuals who are on the go all the time.
I guess I would rather have it on my blackberry smartphone than not, but not a dealbreaker for me.

BB10 isn't out yet, and won't be for a couple of months. Don't get offended because the developers of products that also aren't out yet (seriously, having a successful kickstarter means they are like 6 to 12 months away from the market) haven't specifically mentioned BB10 as being supported. At that stage of development, they are just happy to attract enough interest to get their products to the next stage. What kind of people are interested in those watches (aside from the super-group of people with no taste) ? Smartphone hobbyists, and total fanboys who literally cannot live without getting more crap for their phone. Mostly, the former are on android, the latter are on iPhones. So that's where you start. If/When BB10 becomes a big deal, or at least a recognized part of the smartphone eco-system, then sure, there will be support. But its not out yet. Asking someone if a product they haven't finished developing yet will be compatible with another product that someone else hasn't finished developing yet is always going to get a shrug.

Secondly, all those watches look horrible. I'm not a man who can claim to be 'stylish' but that doesn't mean I don't know what looks good and what doesn't. None of those devices look good, or at least not the right kind of good. They are, for want of a better word, quirky, bright colours with cutesy icons. They are all aimed at the vaguely smart 21-25s; people who always wear a proper shirt, but don't know how to tie a tie. They are fine for those kind of people. They are not for proper professionals.

If someone can make me a smartwatch that looks like a nice, classy, understated everyday mechanical watch, then I would buy that. All I'd want is an LED that mimics my BB's LED, and maybe a little vibrate function for stuff that's flagged important or for calls. Then when I'm working, my phone can stay on silent and in my jacket, but if something that I need to know about now happens I get a nice discrete notifier, and no-one feels like I'm ignoring them.

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